Assembly output may sometimes be surprising, but maintains the language semantics. The surprise comes from either misunderstanding the language semantics, or from performance aspects. Nevertheless, if you understand the language semantics correctly, the program behavior resulting from the output is deterministic and predictable. This is not true for LLMs.
I don't disagree on a factual level, I am just describing some people's subjective experiences: some language semantics can be very subtle, and miscompilation bugs are real. Determining if it is just an aggressive optimization or a real codegen bug can be difficult sometimes, that's all.
To some extent yes, but I don’t think that changes much about the distinction to AI coding I was making. The thing is that language misconceptions are fixable; the LLM unpredictability isn’t.
But that doesn't mean that it's not a gradient, and LLM output may be meaningfully harder to reason about than compiler output, and that may matter.